12 September 2018

I liked Ike

Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first U.S. president I knew of (I was an infant during the Truman administration), and I liked him. He was Pennsylvania Dutch, like my father, and seemed to my youthful mind to be a proper President. Growing up in a household with one parent a Republican and the other a Democrat, I wound up with zero interest in politics per se until my collegiate years, when the events of the late 60s commanded my attention.

I learned more about him yesterday [2012] from an article in The New Republic, which mused about why today's Republicans seldom mention him:

Conservatives had expected that Eisenhower, as the first Republican president since 1932, would repeal the New Deal; instead he augmented and expanded programs like Social Security, thereby giving them bipartisan legitimacy as well as added effectiveness. Conservatives had expected that the president would support Senator Joseph McCarthy’s crusade to tar all liberals as pro-Communist; instead he denied McCarthy the authority to subpoena federal witnesses and receive classified documents, thereby precipitating the red-baiter’s overreach and fall.

Eisenhower governed as a moderate Republican. While he failed to take bold action against Southern segregation as Democratic liberals and Republican progressives urged him to do, he helped to cool the overheated partisan rhetoric of the preceding two decades and built a middle-of-the-road consensus that marginalized extremists of left and right. He was well aware that his moderation earned him the implacable enmity of GOP conservatives. As he put it, “There is a certain reactionary fringe of the Republican Party that hates and despises everything for which I stand.” But this did not greatly bother him, since he also believed that “their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

The conservative movement’s tablet-keepers have long memories, so it’s unsurprising that Ike has remained a devil figure for the right. What may seem more surprising is that at a moment when Republicans are posing as stalwart defenders of a balanced federal budget, they dismiss the example of the most fiscally conservative president of the past eighty years. Eisenhower balanced the budget three times in his eight years in office, a feat that neither Ronald Reagan nor George W. Bush came close to achieving. Ike cut federal civilian employment by 274,000 and reduced the ratio of the national debt to GNP, though not the absolute level of debt. The economy bloomed under his watch, with high growth, low inflation, and low unemployment.

But Eisenhower’s economic success matters little to today’s Republicans given his deviations from conservative orthodoxy. Ike disdained partisanship, praised compromise and cooperation, and pitched his appeals to independent voters. He approved anti-recessionary stimulus spending, extended unemployment compensation, and raised the minimum wage. He pioneered federal aid to education and created the largest public-works program in history in the form of the interstate highway system. He levied gasoline taxes to pay for the highway construction, and believed that cutting income taxes when the federal government was running a deficit would be an act of gross fiscal irresponsibility. The Republican presidential candidates who are beating the drum to bomb Iran are in stark contrast with Eisenhower’s refusal to intervene in Vietnam. And conservative hawks find something vaguely pinko about Ike’s drive to restrain the pace of the arms race and his famous warning about the dangers of the “military-industrial complex.”

In fairness to today’s Republicans, Eisenhower’s values—prudence, pragmatism, reasonableness, frugality, and respect for the past—find little resonance on either side of our present partisan divide, or in American culture as a whole.

Some day I should read a full biography of him; I'm open to suggestions as to which one to choose.

At a White House stag dinner
in February 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower shocked the new chief
justice of the United States. Earl Warren was Eisenhower’s first
appointment to the Supreme Court and had been sworn in just four months
earlier. Only two months into his tenure, Warren had presided over oral
arguments in the blockbuster school-segregation case Brown v. Board of Education.
As of the dinner, the case was still under advisement. Yet Eisenhower
seated Warren near one of the attorneys who had argued the case for the
southern states, John W. Davis, and went out of his way to praise Davis
as a great man. That alone would have made for an awkward evening. What
happened next made it fateful. Over coffee, Eisenhower took Warren by
the arm and asked him to consider the perspective of white parents in
the Deep South. “These are not bad people,” the president said. “All
they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not
required to sit in school alongside some big black bucks.”

It
was an appalling moment. Here was the president leaning on the chief
justice about a pending case while using the racist terms of an
overseer. Several of Eisenhower’s admirers have attempted to downplay
the encounter, but reports confirm that he used racially charged
language in private. The incident left such an impression that Warren
recounted it in his memoirs some 20 years later. Ever decorous, he
sanitized the slur from “black bucks” to “overgrown Negroes,” but in his
biography, Super Chief, Bernard Schwartz, one of Warren’s
confidants, recorded the actual phrase in all its rotten vinegar. Warren
had been a prosecutor and a governor, and was no choirboy; he had heard
bigoted language before. Yet as the chief justice, he embodied the
impartiality of the entire federal judiciary. He was a man who believed
in fairness and dignity. The president’s words had shaken him...

[after the Brown decision] Eisenhower pointedly refused to endorse it. Instead he delivered this
bafflingly terse answer to a reporter’s question: “The Supreme Court has
spoken, and I am sworn to uphold the constitutional process in the
country. And I will obey.” There endeth the statement. Eisenhower
offered no comment in support of racial equality, no expression of
solidarity with African Americans, and no sign of agreement with the
Court’s opinion...

...Eisenhower freely praised the Court’s decisions in other contexts, including, as a candidate, Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer
(1952), which invalidated President Harry Truman’s attempt to seize
control of the steel mills during the Korean War. And Eisenhower
abandoned restraint and threw himself into causes that seemed closer to
his heart than civil rights, such as the fight for a balanced budget.
During violent melees in protest of Brown, Eisenhower temporized,
speaking in private of the need to “understand the southerners as well
as the Negroes,” and denouncing “extremists on both sides”—a familiar
equivalence that elevated racist mobs to the status of civil-rights
marchers...

Sadly, if every president forfeits all civil-rights recognition by using
racist language in the ugly spirit of his age, then Abraham Lincoln and
Lyndon Johnson must go as well. Eisenhower acted to desegregate the
armed forces and took strong steps to desegregate Washington, D.C. After
procrastinating, he decisively enforced Brown by sending federal troops
to Little Rock, Arkansas, to face down Governor Orval Faubus. The
president lent his support, with mixed success, to the effort to pass
the Civil Rights Act of 1957...

Eisenhower believed in incremental change, driven by social progress
rather than law. He demanded intolerable levels of patience from African
Americans, who had already waited centuries for equality. Warren, by
contrast, recognized that America’s formative pathology—its racism—was a
terminal cancer that must be dealt with urgently. He engineered the
boldest stroke against segregation since Reconstruction.

"In fairness to today’s Republicans, Eisenhower’s values—prudence, pragmatism, reasonableness, frugality, and respect for the past—find little resonance on either side of our present partisan divide, or in American culture as a whole."

Is there any greater shame that this, that neither side has it in their heart to be prudent, pragmatic, reasonable, frugal, or respectful of the past? We have allowed the extremists on liberal and conservative TV/radio to think for us. They bask in the glow of our division, joy when someone goes down in flames.

I'd rather have a "plain" president like Ike...and I wasn't even born then.

I'm sorry, but actual "liberals", progressives or the hard left have nobody in D.C. to represent them, save for probably Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich who'll be gone soon after his recent loss. Politics have been a one-sided battle with neoliberalism dominating. A guy like Clinton is only "liberal" if you allow him to be defined by far right wing definitions. Clinton severely restricted aid for the poor, engaged in war, and helped to *continue* to set the table (with Rubin) for the financial crisis. It speaks volumes to how far right we've swung that so many people, liberals included, look back at the "old style conservatives" with an almost kind of admiration.

The reason the Right is now ruled by The Lunatic Right is because that his how George the Senior got into office. Born again W recruited then all to vote his dad in- and we've all suffered the consequences since.

Eisenhower well knew the evils of war, he wanted no more of it if he could help it. And BTW- the reason he was able to pass the legislation necessary to expand the interstate highway system (the only reason he was able to pass it) was because he sold it to his fellow Republicans as an absolute necessity which would sustain the rigors of transporting military grade vehicles across the US. Republicans had no desire whatsoever to provide these roads solely for the everyday use and advantage of the American taxpayer.

I remember being told that the interstate highways had design constraints that required straight, bridge-free segments that could be used for takeoff and landing of military aircraft. Don't know if that's true.

My parents were Republicans and supported Eisenhower. I remember campaigning for him in the 1956 election (I was a sophomore in high school). I really liked Ike. However, when I was first eligible to vote in 1964 (you had to be 21 then), my Republican choice was Barry Goldwater vs. Lyndon Johnson. Goldwater seemed like a far right-wing nut whose saber rattling scared me, and Johnson seemed to me to exemplify the Southern good ol'boy crook. I have been active in politics since my teens, and changed my registration to Democratic in the 80's, when the far right began asserting itself so vigorously. I had also started teaching in inner city Los Angeles, and learned that so much of what I had taken as Gospel truth about the poor, welfare moms, etc. was just plain untrue. These days, I'm pretty darned left wing.

The local community college near me is presenting a 5 part lecture series on Eisenhower. The first presentation a few days ago was actually by his grandson David. Extremely interesting to say the least. It was neat to hear David talk about the president as a grandfather at some points and as president proper at others. One interesting fact was his comparison of Eisenhower to Clinton. Both were the perfect model of a conservative and a liberal yet they both managed to govern from the middle. I am a democrat but I can't wait to see the rest of the series. Camden County College in NJ if interested!

My memory of Eisenhower (I was in my early teens when he left office) is that he played a lot of golf, when he wasn't having heart attacks. There was a "wind-up doll" joke about him that went something like this: If Ike were a wind up doll, you'd wind it up and nothing would happen for 8 years. Obviously, that is an exaggeration of his record: He did get all those wonderful highways built, and he did send American military advisers and the CIA to Vietnam. All said, I admit he was better than the current crop of politicians, on both sides of the aisle.

We must remember that Ike was elected when the US was not involved in any wars, we were in a very prosperous time, and the social revolution(s) had not yet begun. He happened to be there at what has been said was the best of times for the country.

Every historical personage must be considered by the culture/mores of their age. While we rightly are aghast at the use or terms that have a racist connotation, we have to remember that it might be that 50 years from now, those of us who are the least bit reluctant about the full acceptance of the LGBQT "agenda," or who believe that marriage should be reserved for heterosexuals, may very well find that we are denounced by those who are of an age and culture that has changed from today.

Eisenhower was a great president. I don't know of any Republicans that don't think so, although it seems apparent from the post that there are some who hold him at arm's length. Eisenhower was what I consider a near-perfect candidate. Why? Because he was willing to accept ideas from the other side, as well as reject ideas from the Republican side. That means, so far as I can tell, Eisenhower simply "called it as he saw 'em."

We almost never find that happening today. If a Democrat saved a baby from a burning building, Republicans would likely find something rotten to say. AND VICE VERSA! Gone are the days, its seems, when we could actually have a conversation about politics. Instead, we "go nuclear" every opportunity we can.

I would love to have an Eisenhower. I am reading a book about Andrew Jackson called "American Lion." I am quite taken aback by the similarities that I find between him and Trump. They both were men of some fame, both well-to-do, yet both slammed the "elites" in favor of "the common man." Yes, I know that doesn't fit in many ways, but it seemed to fit to me.

I thought Eisenhower had to be incredibly courageous to take on industrial-military complex. I mean that was his bread and butter, in some ways. I do know that he had to play politics in WWII, taking care that Montgomery got to go first into some German area, etc. Also, anyone who successfully worked for MacArthur, who had an enormous ego to go with his enormous talent, has to be someone who can find a path through about anything.

Minnesotastan, "Undaunted Courage" is a WONDERFUL book! I loved it. Let me also recommend "Sea of Glory," about another USA-endorsed exploratory trip--this time around the world, Antarctica, etc. It took place in the early 1800s and what it brought back became the basis of the Smithsonian.

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